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White headphones in the ears, a vase of flowers with butterflies in the background: The defense minister speaks from her home office Monday afternoon. A few hours earlier, the ministry announced that Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer had entered quarantine as a precautionary measure. Your Corona app had displayed a red warning sign, now you have to announce the good news by video.
It is, once again, the Special Forces Command (KSK) in Calw, Baden-Württemberg, that legendary and notorious elite unit of the Bundeswehr, repeatedly making headlines with far-right incidents. The inspector general had presented the promised KSK interim report, the minister announced this afternoon, making clear that “the wall of silence is collapsing” and that the facts can now be better clarified.
This is followed by a lot of self-praise: the report also shows, says Kramp-Karrenbauer, “that we have set the right course on a number of measures.”
It was not until late June that the minister decided to fundamentally restructure the elite force and dissolve one of the four command companies. Soldiers in this unit had received negative attention in April 2017 when they held a pig head tossing competition at the farewell ceremony of a company commander; This was supposed to include right-wing rock and the Hitler salute.
Then, in early summer 2020, investigators unearthed a well-stocked arsenal with plenty of ammunition, two kilograms of Bundeswehr explosives, and Hitler devotional items from a KSK soldier in Saxony. Since then, at the latest, the KSK has been seen as a problem, because the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) is targeting two dozen other commandos as possible right-wing extremists.
As a result, Kramp-Karrenbauer ordered Operation “Iron Broom”. He disbanded the second of the six combat companies because the cases of right-wing extremist soldiers had piled up there and ordered his inspector general to clean up the KSK thoroughly.
The top Bundeswehr soldier has now summarized the current status of the KSK’s conversion work in 21 pages. In it, Eberhard Zorn cautiously reports that everything is clear at one central point. A large part of the ammunition and explosives that the KSK reported as missing were probably incorrectly recorded. “As an interim result, it can be said that a high proportion of the deviations could be traced,” says page 14 of the report. The 62 kilograms of explosives that allegedly disappeared also appear to have been incorrectly counted.
System of four instead of three levels
Zorn announced that the previous three-stage system would be expanded into a fourth stage for command security control, in which activities in group chats should also be verified in the future. The general promised that there would be a next interim result in the spring and a final report in the summer. Until then, it remains to be seen whether the association will remain in its current form.
The ministry’s unwillingness to rush through the KSK reform has a lot to do with a handful of unpopular permanent guests at the Calw Zeppelin headquarters. For many weeks, MAD investigators and various disciplinary defense attorneys, that is, internal Bundeswehr prosecutors, have stayed there. Soldiers would be called in for questioning every day, according to the unit.
Investigators are investigating sensitive questions: Is there a network of right-wing extremists within the elite unit that may even be planning acts of violence? Or is it the elite right-wing fighters of the second company, of whom almost a dozen have already been transferred or withdrawn from the troops, just a few street soldiers who have never been blackened by a misunderstood esprit de corps?
Even those in charge of the ministry are still not sure of a final answer. They avoid the term “network” and prefer to talk about the “characteristics” of right-wing KSK soldiers. The head of the legal department and the responsible secretary of state, Gerd Hoofe, have the intermediate status of the reports that are submitted on a regular basis. They both at least agree that the unit looked the other way for far too long when it came to right-wing extremist soldiers.
The “pig’s head party” remains at the center of internal investigations. At first, all the soldiers involved had said in surprisingly identical ways that nothing bad had happened there. Meanwhile, some have corrected their statements. About two dozen participants are officially investigated.
Researchers have discovered participant chats in recent months that seem unequivocal. If only because some of the chat entries end with the phrase “GruSS”. Or simply put “SH!”, Short for “Sieg Heil”.
Over the weekend, the “Welt” reported on other relevant chats and brief messages between soldiers that MAD had discovered. Also in this case, it is said that unconstitutional organizations have been shown, and the ministry has now confirmed the investigation. The MAD only says that the investigation is far from over, there are always new leads and questions that the investigators are investigating.
Tolerance has not been exercised for a long time. In the summer, a temporary soldier who had been privately in Africa for a few years was not allowed to return to the KSK because he was also in one of the questionable chat groups years ago. Like several other soldiers who have been expelled from the force in recent months, this man will likely also sue against the punitive measure.
